Posted
by
kdawsonon Monday May 11, 2009 @07:36PM
from the fear-of-flying dept.

ausekilis sends us to DarkReading for the news that auditors have identified thousands of vulnerabilities in the FAA's Web-based air traffic control applications — 763 of them high-risk. Here is the report on the Department of Transportation site (PDF). "And the FAA's Air Traffic Organization, which heads up ATC operations, received more than 800 security incident alerts in fiscal 2008, but still had not fixed 17 percent of the flaws that caused them, 'including critical incidents in which hackers may have taken over control of ATO computers,' the report says. ... While the number of serious flaws in the FAA's apps appears to be staggering, Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, says the rate is actually in line with the average number of bugs his security firm finds in most Web applications. ... Auditors were able to hack their way through the Web apps to get to data on the Web application and ATC servers, including the FAA's Traffic Flow Management Infrastructure system, Juneau Aviation Weather System, and the Albuquerque Air Traffic Control Tower. They also were able to gain entry into an ATC system that monitors power, according to the report. Another vulnerability in the FAA's Traffic Flow Management Infrastructure leaves related applications open to malware injection."

Something perhaps the federal government needs. A pool of IT professionals that are available to all federal agencies, with the full range of clearances to keep critical, and not so critical, networked government information and hardware safe from ill-intentioned eyes.

The NSA developed SELinux, yes? Which is supposed to be an insanely secure Linux for the paranoid (who of course wouldn't download something written by the NSA...).

Since Linux could be written to do pretty much, well, anything, a better investment would be an organization that writes custom OSes for departments. ATTLinux (Air Traffic Control), for example. It can do what it has to do and nothing more. No web browser, for instance, or if it had one only certain ports would work period.

The problem is that an operating system is just something you need to get the application to work on the hardware you choose. It might be a small part of the problem. If you decide to create your own custom distro for the purpose of running your application you're going to possibly run into problems getting your application stack to work correctly on top of it or may have problems getting support.

The OS they chose was RHEL [gcn.com] and you can infer some of the rest of the stack from the requirements [74.125.47.132].

They do mention a compromised domain controller, which suggests (though doesn't guarantee) Windows.

They also mention DOT, which I believe is heavily into Windows.

In the late 1980s I know there was some UNIX/X11 development going on for ATC in Germany, but I never heard whether it went big time in Europe, much less in the USA.

There are some references on the net from 2007 or so that the FAA was switching from Win to Lin, but I'm not sure what systems those were, or if it really happened. They could easily run a mix of UNIX, Linux, Windows and others on the back end, and mostly Windows on the front end.

No, it really doesn't secure it. Too many network based utilities require far too much privilege to operate, Internet Explorer is a sinkhole of security vulnerabilities, and autorun remains the default for CD's, USB's, and other detachable media. Proxies are like the Maginot Line of security: they provide a useful pretense at security, but only have to be pierced once to allow the invaders to overrun your internal network.

It only takes one newly installed laptop, exposed to the Internet while pulling down i

Karma be damned, but the use of Windows in a secure system is nowhere near as bad as not sanitizing your inputs on any system. No platform can just make up for bad practice. FreeBSD will happily allow someone to guess 'PASSWORD' as the login password (from TFA: "Software configuration involves setting up a software system for one's particular uses, such as changing a factory-set default password of "PASSWORD" to one less easily guessed."). If you're using Oracle DB, MS SQL or MySQL, if you store passwords as plaintext instead of hashes and secure data in plaintext, you will run into problems (TFA: "...hackers had the ability to obtain more than 40,000 FAA user IDs, passwords, and other information used to control a portion of the FAA mission-support network."). Microsoft may not patch in a timely manner, but it doesn't matter what platform you're running if you don't apply the patches (TFA: "...software with known vulnerabilities was not corrected in a timely manner by installing readily available security software patches released to the public by software vendors."). PHP, JSP, ASP, ASP.NET, Ruby, Perl or whatever, if you program poorly, you're going to have problems.

'FreeBSD will happily allow someone to guess 'PASSWORD' as the login password (from TFA: "Software configuration involves setting up a software system for one's particular uses, such as changing a factory-set default password of "PASSWORD" to one less easily guessed.")'

Where does it say they were using FreeBSD

'if you store passwords as plaintext instead of hashes and secure data in plaintext, you will run into problems (TFA: "...hackers had the ability to obtain more than 40,000 FAA user IDs, password

Mainly before it doesn't matter. These computers have a problems that are totally unrelated to Windows at all, such as easily guessable passwords, unpatched vulnerabilities and easily accessible passwords, unencrypted in the database.

I saw no mention of how they are using Windows or if they are using Windows at all. Under the recommendations, they made no recommendations to stop using Windows at all.

Actually, it looks like one of these FAA system (Traffic Flow Management System) is running RedHat Enterprise Linux on the servers and workstations with an Oracle backend. The system was migrated from HP/UX to Linux [gcn.com].

As a security engineer(CISSP&CSSLP) with several years of experience in C&A and pen testing, I must say that the results aren't a surprise by any means.
What I DO find disturbing is the amount of detail provided in a public report given the fact that the FAA has yet to fully apply it's remediation strategies for the vulnerabilities identified.
Is there any info as to what tools they used for app testing? My experience shows that tools such as App Detective and Web Inspect actually inflate the number of findings. This is due to the fact that the applications identify vulnerabilities by instance and not by category/type.

Funny thing...
I was developing a web app security assessment platform like Metasploit but for web apps...so I had to get a peak at the competition.
So like a good boy I set up a logger on my website and asked a big security firm to demo their own automated web assessment tool on my website.
I received a report of some hundreds of vulnerabilities. Needles to say not one of them was correct. So I e-mailed them back and told them and got a response with an apology.
If they used an automated tool like that it's very probable most of the vulns were false positives.
Oh and by the way, many of these tools detect e-mail addresses or contact info posted on the site as a possible vulnerabilities because they provide "sensitive information".

My point being...don't fully trust the report. Sure they must have some serious security risks on their website but 3.800 seems extravagant.

PS. Sorry to the guy above me with the

I want a link to the page where I can control a plane!!

for removing my mod +1 funny to his comment. I just had to post this reply. hehe

In this case step 1 of the security assessment, does it need to be connected to the internet, 'NO', then don't connect it. Step 2 risk assessment, just because web apps and the internet are the cheapest way of doing things, is it appropriate where thousands of peoples lives are at risk 'NO', then don't do it as a web app, spend the extra money or eventually the laws will change and you will go to jail for killing people just to save a few bucks.

I'm with you 100%.
Mission critical systems should not be accessible to the outside world.
If you really want to remote control it write your own client/server or whitelist IP addresses, add encryption or just use a VPN.
Scratch that...do all of the above!
I mean which net architect/admin can't set up a simple VPN? That's what they were designed for...that's what they're good at.
You can pick-up any CCNA (yes I know i'm kinda advertising here I don't care) student and he'll do it for you...

As a pilot I've had to interact with a lot of the FAA's web presence. Much of this seems to stem from convenience and cost cutting around flight planning.

Currently, the FAA operates a telnet based Direct User Access Terminal, which provides flight planning information (both weather and wind/time calculations) and the ability to file a flight plan over the internet. That system is used by any number of sites to put a pretty face on it and make it more user friendly. In short, a pilot could plan a flight and

does it need to be connected to the internet, 'NO', then don't connect it.

This is the question I'm really interested in... are the machines in question (particularly those actually involved in ATC) connected to the internet? If the machines can be hit from the internet, this is a giant problem. But if you have to start with physical access to the network because it's physically isolated from the larger internet, that's not nearly as bad. You still have to worry about an "inside job", but that's a lot less

"I set up a logger on my website and asked a big security firm to demo their own automated web assessment tool on my website. I received a report of some hundreds of vulnerabilities. Needles to say not one of them was correct"

What was the name of this big security firm, the name of the web assessment tool and the name of your site. And how does this affect the validity or otherwise of the FAA report [dot.gov]?

Yeah, I remember my old job...they hired Arthur Andersen to do some security testing...some guy in a nice suit arrived, ran Nessus against our network, PRINTED IT OUT, and gave it to the boss in a nice leather-bound book. And that was it.

Nessus circa 2001 was well-known for its many false positives and warnings, although there was useful information in there if you went through it.

I have never seen a company with a security department large enough to realistically keep the number of publicly-discoverable/exploitable vulneraiblites in a network to near zero. Most companies have just enough IT security staff to fill checkboxes on some auditor's clipboard. Companies with relatively "good" security may have enough staff to actually address the most severe and easily exploited problems with their networks. In such a "good" company, any hacker who wants to break in to that company will be

"And the FAA's Air Traffic Organization, which heads up ATC operations, received more than 800 security incident alerts in fiscal 2008, but still had not fixed 17 percent of the flaws that caused them, 'including critical incidents in which hackers may have taken over control of ATO computers,' the report says.... While the number of serious flaws in the FAA's apps appears to be staggering, Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, says the rate is actually in line with the average number of bugs his se

This is a myth about government contracts. While cost is of course a major factor in government bids, they are also required to take into account factors like service, company reputation, and proven technical ability to do the job at the cost quoted.

I work for a defense contractor, and in every contract where I've been a part of the bidding process, yes, cost is a factor... but it's explicitly the least important factor. It comes in behind past performance, demonstrated ability to do the work, etc. I'm not sure how the government selected contractors in the past, but these days, cost is only part of the answer, and not necessarily the biggest part.

Does that make you feel unsafe? How about the fact that all the guys hired after Reagan fired the ATCs for striking are retiring en masse right now? I guess the bright side is when the new guys show up, they'll raise hell about the Rube Goldberg computer system in operation now. "Hey, I can write an iPhone app that would do a better job than this old PASCAL program..."

Web based can be easy to develop UI wise, and flexible client wise (no need to install client software, easy maintenance of the software server side only).

The big question to me would be: how can a hacker get access to flight control in the first place? There is no need for those computers to be exposed to the Internet - and definitely not for those web servers to talk to anyone outside their own subnet. I do assume at least we're not talking about hackers that have gained physical access as then there is

It makes it easier to file a flight plan. Instead of calling up a flight service station on the phone and going through the error prone process of giving them my flight plan, I can do it online. I find it to be easier and the government likes it because it is cheaper.

Note that, although this is not a good thing, we're not actually talking about the ATC system here. We're talking about administrative web applications that employees can access from home, web sites that provide information about air traffic services to employees and to the public, power monitoring applications, things like that. Some are pretty serious, but most are not that serious. And none of them are the ATC system itself.

Newsworthy? Yes. Should it be reportable? No.
One of the biggest problems in reporting stories like this is the fact that the information is now OUT THERE. FFS, it's pretty dumb to put this information in the public press.
"Hey! Terrorists! You want to know where our vulnerabilities are!? We've just finished the report, so here you go!"
I don't believe in censoring press... but doesn't common sense kick in at some point? Fix the vulnerabilities FIRST!!!

How did they manage to not once mention what Operating System these 'computers' run on

In FY 2008, hackers took over FAA computers in Alaska, becoming FAA "insiders." By taking advantage of FAA's interconnected networks, hackers later stole FAA's enterprise administrator's password in Oklahoma, installed malicious codes [dot.gov] with the stolen password, and compromised FAA's domain controller in its Western Pacific Region. At that point, hackers had the ability to obtain more than 40,000 FAA user IDs, passwords, and

I'm the last person to defend a federal agency, but if you run any large application through something like Fortify this will happen and this is 70 applications being tested for the first time.

High and medium vulns need to be addressed very quickly, and there were 1267 of those. Of those, 381 were on public facing systems. The remaining were "low" which are often things like "your server appears to be running Apache" or on internal systems, which while bad, is not as bad as stuff in your DMZ.